Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America that was coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.
He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Available at Amazon. Also available at Barnes & Noble or other book stores.

Thomas Merton: The Only Known Photograph of God

An avowed rationalist, W.C. Fields was reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room when his manager entered. "Bill," said the manager, "What the hell are you doing? I thought you were an atheist."
"Just looking for loopholes," said Fields. "Just looking for loopholes."

A Dance to the Secrets of Time and Motion: The Pendulum Wave

Notice that at first the swinging balls form a line, then fall out of sync, forming snakes, squiggles and spirals. Our brains are wired to predict everyday behavior. We need math to understand this. Yet the world blunders on, trusting what is comfortably predictable.

Bats & Echolocation: Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

Fugue:
My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and
play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only
recognize myself as a symphony.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietCounter Fugue:
What I cannot build, I cannot understand.
—Richard Feynman, physicist. as quoted by Craig Venter & encoded as a watermark in DNA of the first ever synthetic organism.

Clouds & ClocksAll they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable. It depends on your point of view.

More Is Different: EmergenceAs P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.

You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.

We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. . .
But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.(John Donne, Sermons)

Foucault Pendulum

In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.

5/24/11

Proust, Marshmallows & Meaning In Life

Tweet With his In Search of Lost Time (formerly Remembrance of Things Past) as one of the few 20th Century works of literary genius, Marcel Proust found memories in the taste of a petite madeleine. They were some of the most unique things about himself. A recluse, he did not go on expedition to the arctic nor did he venture far from his cork-lined room in Paris, but his life was an interior adventure in which he sought to unravel the mysteries of time. With involuntary memory he looked for the permanent and significant amidst the transitory and trivial. Quite simply, he created great art from trivia. In each of us, the trivia is the most important thing about us--"impressions clustered in small knots," Proust said. This trivia he called "inner time" and it is the past that "still lives in us." It is "what we are and is remaking us every moment." An hour is a vase, "filled with perfumes, sounds, places, climates."

From a trivial marshmallow, in 1972 Walter Mischel worked an experiment that helped predict the personality and future of children as well as give us insight into the nature of what is popularly called free will. You can read about the marshmallow experiment elsewhere, but its essence is this. A child of three or four was seated in a room with a marshmallow (or oreo cookie or pretzel) on the table next him or her. Before leaving the room the researcher told the child that he would be back in fifteen minutes and if the marshmallow was still on the table at his return, the child would be rewarded with a second goodie.

Looking through a TV monitor at the room, the researcher could see the child struggling with temptation. Some would "tug on their pigtails." Others would hold their hands over their eyes or kick the desk or even "stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal." Some would eat it as soon as the researcher left the room.

Of the 600 participants about one third were able to defer gratification. 200 out of 600. A follow-up study on these 200 as adolescents revealed them to be significantly more competent in studies and social skills. They also achieved higher SAT scores. Early on, they knew how to defer gratification.

Our lives are built on such small things, most often without realizing it. We think of our lives in terms of broad brush strokes, of career paths, of rites of passage, but those paths and those rites were partly shaped by a continuous string of fleeting moments like the temptation of marshmallows and how we reacted to it: a chance compliment or insult on an important date, a missed catch or drop kick in the big game Our characters are built by how, over time, we perceive those moments.

In Proust's day, the model for character-building was different. The generally accepted model was this. Stage one was perception. Upon perceiving something, the object perceived was, as a second stage, assessed in terms of long-term interest for the individual. What was in his best interests? Drink a glass of whiskey? Or wait for another "marshmallow"? (a healthy future without alcohol addiction.) After the evaluation, the third step was for him to exercise his will. If an individual succumbed to temptation he was regarded as weak-willed. Head and heart were metaphors used in Victorian times. The head must control the heart, else the heart, the emotions, would take over. Above all, will was important. An instrument of reason, it provided a dam against the flood of feelings.

Modern cognitive psychology yields another point of view. The marshmallow experiment helps us understand it. The experiment suggests there are not three stages, perception, evaluation, and will, before a choice is made. Instead, the first stage, perception itself, either helps long-term interests or hinders them. Read: strategies for perception. If they looked at it with longing, the children were bound to eat the marshmallow. If they hid eyes, pulled pigtails, or stroked the goodie, they were altering how they perceived the marshmallow--less longingly, more distractedly. They were manipulating the unconscious so it didn't over-ride the conscious.

Today, we understand that the will via reason, cannot serve as a dam against the unconscious, for the nether brain is often too strong for reason to withstand. 19th Century iron will, the dam against emotion, is passé. The children with deferred-gratification skills demonstrated strategies to circumvent--not dam--the power of the unconscious. Through strategies, they re-shaped unconscious processes. These skills became habits in later life, and a part or their inner story.

An asthmatic, Proust shaped his novel and his life through his illness. In them he found meaning. He wrote that "in sickness, we become aware that, far from being alone, we live chained to--yet worlds apart from--a creature of a different order who does not know us and to whom it is impossible for us to make ourselves understood: our body." Like the unconscious, the body has a tendency to go its own way. Proust's stratagem was to give meaning to his life through the very illnesses that kept him from the world--that otherwise would have prevented him from finding that meaning. His life narrative was a story of his sickness, and his search for lost time was a quest for something permanent in a fading life. He had little use for those who did not appreciate the fleetingness of their lives--the bored, the social butterflies. They were idlers who "slept" through the passing of life's moments. His ailing body made Proust acutely aware of his mortality. As Samuel Johnson put it, "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

From Proust and from the children in the marshmallow experiment we can learn something of major importance. Just as perceptual devices help shape the future course of life, so self-narratives help determine how we perceive life. Proust's narrative was illness as metaphor. It led to a work of genius. Most of us, though, would opt for happy, fulfilled lives with children and mates of like spirit. The stories we tell about ourselves are like the perceptions of the kids with marshmallows--they shape how we respond to situations. Children do not form a narrative about their lives until into adolescence, but for the rest of their lives they live in their story, influenced by how they learned to deal with perceptions early on.

In The Redemptive Self, Northwestern psychology professor Dan P. McAdams, says of personal narratives,“We find that when it comes to the big choices people make--Should I marry this person? Should I take this job? Should I move across the country?--they draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not.” He points out that seeing oneself in a narrative is not indulgence; it is central to who we are.

Just as the successful children devised effective perceptual strategies that stood them in good stead as adults, so we can change the perception of our lives by our narratives.

Proust shaped his life out of the search for time in memory. He went forward into the future by gazing into the past. His rooms were lined with cork to dull sounds, to keep out the bustle of life, to protect him from the relentless, surging world. From him we can learn though. He was formed by how he perceived his life, and by his narrative thereof. So are we. Like Proust, we should not only think of our lives in broad brush strokes, but should be attentive to perceptions and where we want them to lead our lives.

From my former Zen teacher, Joko Beck, I learned something about attention. She gave the koan lesson of a student who once asked Master Ichu, "Please write for me something of great wisdom."

With his brush, the master wrote the character for attention. It was just one word.

The student asked, "Is that all?" Saying it did not at all sound profound or subtle, he asked the master what it meant.

Master Ichu replied, "Attention means attention."

Ichu meant that for meditation in a zendo nothing should be added to the perception. The marshmallow experiment indicates that for life fulfillment in a difficult and challenging society, something should be added.

For Proust attention meant attention with the search for lost time. Be alert. Pay attention to our perceptions, he would have said. As we attend to them with our perceptual devices we shape or reshape our life narratives and thereby our present and future sense of fulfillment and happiness.Tweet

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Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. W.B.Yeats

I have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what dream it was.A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iv, i.&nbsp
On John Van Druten's gravestone

Martians are discussing humans, after one of them has visited Earth:
"These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat. . . .They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat."
"So . . .what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal. Are you getting the picture?"
(From "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bisson. Of such a contention, Colin McGinn says we are not equipped to explain the experience of consciousness.)

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

God and the Devil are talking, looking down at the desert where one of God's chosen is having a sacred vision. "You see," says God.” Now you will be out of business because my child has realized the Truth."Not at all," says the Devil. "I will help him organize it."

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/
Is my destroyer./
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas

Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.(Delmore Schwarz)

It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things. &nbsp Ernst Mach

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Ernest HemingwayI can imagine Jack The Ripper also saying this. John